Five Hypotheses

1. We cannot curb climate change without a carbon tax.

2. No carbon tax will work unless it is global.

3. A global carbon tax cannot be legitimate unless it is levied by a representative assembly, practicing democracy on a global scale.

4. Such an assembly will be democratic only if it is accountable to individual voters themselves,  not to any aggregate groups such as nation states.

5. This type of assembly could be elected in this century.

Taking advantage . . .

Taking advantage of Somalia's lack of a government, foreign fleets descended on the Somalian coast, often within the territorial limit, and began overfishing stocks that coastal communities had recently begun to harvest for themselves. With no coast guard to protect their interests and no voice in the international community, local fishermen began seizing and ransoming foreign fishing vessels and their crews. This retributive privateering quickly attracted the interest of local warlords, terrorists, and others who expanded the scope of their operations to seize piratically and indiscriminately anything from container ships and tankers to cruise ships and private yachts regardless of flag. While this has become an obvious criminal problem, the underlying cause, namely illegal fishing, is a more disturbing threat to the global commons.

Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 595.

One can live by dogma . . .

One can live by dogma or by discovery. Dogmas (from the Greek for received opinions that “seem good") may seem to unify people (as is the implied intent of religious dogma, religio being Latin for “binding together") but insofar as dogma must be taken on faith it winds up bifurcating humanity into a faithful us and a suspect other. Scientific discovery might have divided the world, but instead has found that all human beings are kin---to one another and to all other living things---in a universe where stars and starfish alike obey the same physical laws. So as we humans move from dogma toward discovery, we increasingly find ourselves inhabiting one world.

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 261.

It may take many years . . .

It may take many years to achieve such an addition to the body of world law. In the meantime, much could be done through a change in the policies of the great nations. During recent years insurrections and civil wars in small countries have been instigated and aggravated by the great powers, which have moreover provided weapons and military advisers, increasing the savagery of the wars and the suffering of the people. In four countries during 1963 and several others during preceding years, democratically elected governments, with policies in the direction of social and economic reform, have been overthrown and replaced by military dictatorship, with the approval, if not at the instigation of one or more of the great powers. These actions of the great powers are associated with policies of militarism and national economic interest that are now antiquated. I hope that the pressure of world opinion will soon cause them to be abandoned and to be replaced by policies that are compatible with the principles of morality, justice, and world brotherhood.

Linus Pauling,  Nobel Lecture. December 11, 1963. URL: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1962/pauling-lecture.html

 

In the spring of 1968 . . .

In the spring of 1968, shortly before I graduated from Yale, my father returned to campus to visit me and attend his twenty-fifth reunion. He ran into [Cord] Meyer at a bar set up for alumni in their blazers and bow ties and big blue lapel buttons announcing their name and class. “The world is in a fight to the death between us and the other side,” growled Meyer, “and I am the Lord High Executioner.”

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 211.

If and when . . .

If and when the advocates of democratic reform in the Soviet Union succeed, we can look forward also to the day when the repressed Eastern European peoples are allowed to choose their own political leadership freely. . . . Many forms of international cooperation about which now we can only dream would then become possible to make this a safer and more prosperous world. Once again the construction of a world legal order to replace the anarchy of competing nation-states would appear on the agenda of far-sighted and practical statesmen, and what seemed briefly possible after World War II would have a second chance.

Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 408-409.

Medieval doctors . . .

Medieval doctors held the state  to be a consequence---or wages---of original sin. A sin-proof society could sing and frisk ad lib, with everyone “crowned and mitred” as his self's emperor and pope, and the harness of collective government packed away in a museum of prehistory.

What kind of community do those modern doctors have in mind when they say that there is no world community for a World Government?

Is this city, Chicago, a community in the sense, we guess, that they mean? Do the tenants of the Negro belt drop in for tea at the mansions of the North Side? Is Cicero, on our western border, the shrine of Saint Alph Capone? Yet this city has a municipality, a government, and Cicero has too. Plenty of common causes---lighting, water, sewage, conveyances, roads, parks, hospitals, schools, churches, yes, courts, yes, jails---hold their millions together. Force, governmental, lays its decisive accent on the consent, insures the continuity of the covenant in spite of race or creed, open feud or rampant revolt.

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Foundations of the World Republic. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 26.

 

I never knew . . .

I never knew, when traveling to address a new chapter [of the United World Federalists], what manner of people I would be dealing with. In a wealthy Chicago suburb, the leaders would be prominent businessmen and their wives. In El Paso, the local chapter leader turned out to be the owner of a photography shop who had been a Trotskyist in his youth and claimed to be the man who had brought Trotsky across the Mexican border in a fake coffin to address the San Francisco dock strikers. I was particularly impressed by the energy and organizational competence of the many women volunteers and came to have a healthy respect for their role and influence in a community once they had convinced themselves that UFW offered some hope for a peaceful future.

Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 44-45.

In urging . . .

In urging the adoption of the United States Constitution, Alexander Hamilton told his fellow New Yorkers “to think continentally.” Today Americans must learn to think inter-continentally. 

Acting on our own, by ourselves, we cannot establish justice throughout the world; we cannot insure its domestic tranquility, or provide for its common defense, or promote its general welfare, or secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. But joined with other free nations, we can do all this and more.

John F. Kennedy, “Declaration of Interdependence.”  Address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia. July 4th, 1962

Most people agree . . .

Most people agree that the old, intergovernmental formula of science administration has run its course---that, reflecting a nineteenth century concept of science as passively observing and describing nature, it has lost its efficacy. This leads, on the one hand, to catastrophic gaps between knowledge and action, as was the case when scientists fully well knew what was happening to the blue whale, but politicians failed to act on that knowledge and brought this marvelous beast to the edge, or past the edge, of extinction. On the other hand, it engenders duplications of effort that degenerate into waste. There are today at least thirteen intergovernmental agencies and fourteen committees at the world level that are dealing with matters of science and technology within the U.N. system, and sometimes their frames of reference are literally the same.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese, introductory essay to her edited volume Pacem in Maribus (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972), xvii.

Our choice is not between . . .

Our choice is not between a “moderate” status-quo oriented regime, and a radical, utopian one. The status-quo is the most unreal of all unrealities. Those who timidly aim at a “moderate” regime simply will not be able to sway the forces of inertia.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese, introductory essay to her edited volume Pacem in Maribus (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972), xxxiv.

Everyone in the New Left . . .

Everyone in the New Left opposed Kennedy's space program, seeing it (correctly) as a cold war episode that they thought (incorrectly) was being carried out to no-good purpose by crew-cut military squares. (Only Abbie Hoffman disagreed with his compatriots: “Are you kidding? We're going to the fucking MOON!”) Environmentalists joined the leftist opposition to the  space program: “We have to clean up the Earth before we can leave it.”

The exception was Jacques Cousteau, the pioneer of underwater exploration. In a 1976 interview for CoEvolution, he told me that in the 1960s his fellow ocean specialists were scandalized by the expense and irrelevance of the U.S. space program, but he supported it for philosophical reasons that quickly became practical. Cousteau realized that satellites were the only way to monitor the health of the oceans.

Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. (New York: Viking, 2009), 214.

If science . . .

If science, impelled by its internal evolution, must act the way industry and the military do, it is industry and the military that are threatening and undermining the freedom of research from outside. While science and technology have taken on an unprecedented and all-pervasive importance in contemporary society, affecting the life of every citizen, of every living being---while it has become a productive force, a means of production---it is today largely determined by the interests and axioms of those who in a given society exercise real power.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese, introductory essay to her edited volume Pacem in Maribus (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972), xvi.

 

Even in the midst . . .

Even in the midst of the Korean War, Truman was still thinking wistfully about “Locksley Hall.” Riding in his limousine after an early morning walk with the author John Hersey in 1951, Truman took the folded piece of paper our of his wallet and let Hersey read it. “Notice the part about universal law,” said the president. “We're going to have that some day. I guess that's what I've really been working for ever since I first put that poetry in my pocket.”

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 210.

Benevolence is tepid . . .

Benevolence is tepid; hatred and its complement, vanity, are stinging hot and high flavored. That is why National Socialism is so much easier to popularize than the League of Nations. It will be the task of the psychological engineers to see how far cooperation can be combined with socially harmless, but psychologically rewarding, competitions and rivalry. . . . Rivalry in sports. Rivalry---but this, alas, would probably arouse not the smallest popular enthusiasm---in scientific and artistic achievement. The substitutes for militant nationalism may be almost as exciting as the things they replace. Thus, at Constantinople, feeling at the chariot races ran so high that Greens and Blues were ready to kill one another by the thousand. It is clear that the homeopathic remedy for militant nationalism can be made as fatal as the disease.

Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934), 91-92.

 

In September of 1945 . . .

In September of 1945, Einstein wrote to his friend and colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer: “The wretched attempts to achieve international security, as it is understood today by our governments, do not alter at all the political structure of the world, do not recognize at all the competing sovereign nation-states as the real cause of conflicts.  . . . Without an over-all solution to give up-to-date expression to the democratic sovereignty of the peoples, all attempts to avoid specific dangers in the international field seem to me illusory.”

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 197

 

The people of the earth have . . .

The people of the earth have . . . entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has been developed to a point where a violation of laws in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan law is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international law, transforming it into a universal law of humanity.

Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)  in Kant: Political Writings, ed, Hans Siegbert Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) quoted in Nussbaum, Martha C., "Kant and Cosmopolitanism" in Held, David and Garrett Wallace Brown, eds. The Cosmopolitan Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 27.

Neil Armstrong remarked . . .

Neil Armstrong remarked that from the Moon, the Earth was so small that he could blot it out with his thumb. Did this make him feel big, he was asked. “No," he replied, “it made me feel really, really small."

Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 190.

As nations grow more dysfunctional . . .

As nations grow more dysfunctional, cities are rising. When it comes to democracy, they command the majority. Rooted in ancient history, they still lean to the future. As we reach the limits of independence and private markets, they define interdependence and public culture. On a pluralistic planet of difference, they embrace multiculturalism. And as our times plead for innovation, they exude creativity. Reasons enough---good reasons---why mayors and their fellow citizens can and should rule the world.

Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 358-359.

Building a world parliament . . .

Building a world parliament is not the same as building a world government. We would be creating a chamber in which, if it works as it should, the people's representatives will hold debates and argue over resolutions. In the early years at least, it commands no army, no police force, no courts, no departments of government. It need be encumbered by neither president nor cabinet. But what we have created is a body which possesses something no other global or international agency can claim: legitimacy. Directly elected, owned by the people of the world, our parliament would possess the moral authority which all other bodies lack. And this alone, if effectively deployed, is a source of power.

George Monbiot, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order (London: Flamingo, 2003), 93-94.

How consoling for the philosopher . . .

How consoling for the philosopher who laments the errors, the crimes, the injustices which still pollute the earth and of which he is often the victim is this view of the human race, emancipated from its shackles, released from the empire of fate and from the enemies of its progress, advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness! It is the contemplation of this project that rewards him for his efforts to assist the progress of reason and the defense of liberty.  

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet [shortly before he was arrested on the orders of Robespierre and died in custody at Bourge-la-Reine while awaiting execution]
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793)
June Barraclough, trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 201.

When the rulers of the world . . .

When the rulers of the world cloister themselves behind the fences of Seattle and Genoa, or ascend into the inaccessible eyries of Doha and Kananaskis, they leave the rest of us shut out of their deliberations. We are left to shout abuse, hurl ourselves against the lines of police, to seek to smash the fences which stand between us and the decisions being made on our behalf. They reduce us, in other words, to the mob, and then revile the thing they have created. When, like cardinals who have elected a new pope, they emerge, clothed in the serenity of power, to announce that it is done, our howls of execration serve only to enhance the graciousness of their detachment. They are the actors, we the audience, and for all our calls and imprecations, we can no more change the script of the play than the patrons of a cinema can change the course of the film they watch. They, the tiniest and most unrepresentative of the world's minorities, assert a popular mandate that they do not possess, then accuse us of illegitimacy. Their rule, unauthorized and untested, is sovereign.

George Monbiot, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order (London: Flamingo, 2003), 84.

In a similar vein . . .

In a similar vein, the wife of one of America's most successful fund managers offered me the small but telling anecdote that her husband is better able to navigate the streets of Davos than those of his native Manhattan. When he's home, she explained, he is ferried around by a car and driver; the snow Swiss hamlet, which is too small and awkward for limos, is the only place where he actually walks.

Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 61.

There is an emergent power . . .

“There is an emergent power in people whose shared experiences are more to each other than to their local context and their local governments. I think that's basically true," [ former Google CEO Eric] Schmidt told me. “The people you're describing see themselves as global citizens first. That's a relatively new phenomenon. So, while they're certainly patriotic about their countries and patriotic about where they grew up, and they love their mothers and so forth . . .  they see themselves as global citizens. And so, when something happens in the world that's bad, it bothers them."

Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 60.

The beauty of the world . . .

The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the supreme being.

Jonathan Edwards, “The Beauty of the World" (1725) in Branch, Michael P., ed. Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 123.

Derived from the Latin verb fidere . . .

Derived from the Latin verb fidere, “to trust" and related to foedus (“treaty"), the word federal had previously been used most commonly as a theological term that referred to the divine devolution of responsibility to human beings (i.e. the covenants whereby God made Abraham and Moses responsible for insuring that Israel worshiped the one and only God, and Christ responsible for redeeming humankind). In its secular context, a federal system was one in which the highest authority devolved power to subsidiary ones.

Hume refined the concept. He sought to combine the advantages of local accountability with those of a large state. . . . What was required, Hume concluded, was a system that left as much power as possible at the lower levels while investing as much as necessary in the higher ones.

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 92.

[T]he 1970s saw significant environmental diplomacy . . .

Thus the 1970s saw significant environmental diplomacy: as many treaties were drawn up in a single decade as in the previous forty years. One consequence was that the seas became markedly cleaner as agreements were reached to control marine dumping and land-based sources of marine pollution as well. In the Mediterranean, for instance, untreated sewage, industrial effluent, and oil had pushed up pollution to a “critical level.”        . . . The UNEP [United Nations Environment Programme] played a part in helping to turn this around, and under its leadership Israel and the Arab states, Greece, and Turkey all participated in the cleanup. It was not a route to larger regional peace. But pollution levels were stabilized, and water cleanliness improved despite the rapid growth of cities and industries around its shores.

Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012), 336.

If the present process of deterioration . . .

If the present process of deterioration is to be halted, things are going to have to be done which will encounter formidable resistance from individual governments and powerful interests within individual countries. Only an entity that has great prestige, great authority and active support from centers of influence within the world's most powerful industrial and maritime nations will be able to make headway against such recalcitrance. One can conceive of a single organization's possessing such prestige and authority. It is harder to conceive of the purpose being served by some fifty to a hundred organizations, each active in a different field, all of them together presenting a pattern too complicated even to be understood or borne in mind by the world public.

All of this would seem to speak for the establishment of a single entity which, while not duplicating the work of existing organizations, could review this work from the standpoint of man's environmental needs as a whole, could make it its task to spot the inadequacies and identify the unfilled needs, could help to keep governments and leaders of opinion informed as to what ought to be done to meet minimum needs, could endeavor to assure that proper rules and standards are established wherever they are needed, and could, where desired, take a hand, vigorously and impartially, in the work of enforcement of rules and standards. It would not have to perform all these various functions itself-except perhaps where there was no one else to do so. Its responsibility should be rather to define their desirable dimensions and to exert itself, and use its influence with governments, to the end that all of them were performed by someone, and in an adequate way.

This entity, while naturally requiring the initiative of governments for its inception and their continued interest for its support, would have to be one in which the substantive decisions would be taken not on the basis of compromise among governmental representatives but on the basis of collaboration among scholars, scientists, experts, and perhaps also something in the nature of environmental statesmen and diplomats-but true international servants, bound by no national or political mandate, by nothing, in fact, other than dedication to the work at hand.

George F. Kennan, "To Prevent a World Wasteland" Foreign Affairs. Vol. 48, No. 3. April 1970

A well-traveled polyglot . . .

A well-traveled polyglot is as likely to be among the worst off as the best off---as likely to be found in a shantytown as in the Sorbonne. So cosmopolitanism shouldn't be seen as some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association.

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006),  xviii-xix.

Un prince croit . . .

Un prince croit qu’il sera plus grand par la ruine d’un État voisin. Au contraire ! Les choses sont telles en Europe que tous les États dépendent les uns des autres. La France a besoin de l’opulence de la Pologne et de la Moscovie, comme la Guyenne a besoin de la Bretagne, et la Bretagne, de l’Anjou. L’Europe est un État composé de plusieurs provincs.

 TRANSLATION: A prince thinks he will be greater by the ruin of a neighboring state. On the contrary! Things are such in Europe that all states depend upon each other. France needs the opulence of Poland and Muscovy as Guyenne needs Brittany, and Brittany Anjou. Europe is a state composed of several provinces.

Montesquieu, Pensées, 318 (ca. 1727)
quoted in Spector, Céline. “Europe” A Montequieu Dictionary  http://dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/1380009044/en/ (accessed July 6th, 2015)

A global state would . . .

A global state would have at least three obvious problems. It could easily accumulate uncontrollable power, which it might use to do great harm; it would often be unresponsive to local needs; and it would almost certainly reduce the variety of institutional experimentation from which all of us can learn.

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 163.

All men being originally equals . . .

All men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though he might himself deserve some decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of the hereditary right of kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it to ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.

Tom Paine, Common Sense (1776) In Foner, Eric, ed. Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, Fourth Edition, Volume 1. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 96-97.

People everywhere wish for . . .

People everywhere wish for a better world---a more peaceful and prosperous world, where their children can live healthy, happy lives---and they have long sought the right intellectual tools with which to pursue this goal. Religion works best when it emphasizes common decency, philosophy when stressing our ignorance, art when exposing us to visions larger than ourselves, history by drawing lessons from the past---but the most effective tools are liberalism and science. They may on occasion lead to harmful results, as may anything else: You can poison a prophet with a Girl Scout cookie. But science and liberalism have an unequaled capacity for doing good---for reducing cruel ignorance and villainous certitude, encouraging freedom and effective government, promoting human rights, putting food in the mouths of the hungry and attainable prospects in their future. If we keep our heads, use our heads, nourish learning, tend the fires of freedom, and treat one another with justice and compassion, our descendants may say of us that we had the vision to do science, and the courage to live by liberty.

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 290-291.

With respect to commerce . . .

With respect to commerce we may ask: “Will the United Nations in our lifetime emulate the United States in Washington’s?” We can point to Chief Justice Marshall’s words: “The power over commerce was one of the primary objects for which the people of the United States adopted their government.” Will some future “Marshall” some day say: “The power over commerce was one of the primary means by which the people of the world developed world government.”?

Benton Mackaye, “Toward Global Law” (first published in The Survey, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 6. June, 1951) in  From Geography to Geotechnics (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 103. 

The dictators are right . . .

The dictators are right when they blame the democracies for the world's condition, but they are wrong when they blame it on democracy. The anarchy comes from the refusal of the democracies to renounce enough of their national sovereignty to let effective world law and order be set up. But their refusal to do this, their maintenance of the state for its own sake, their readiness to sacrifice the lives and liberties of the citizens rather than the independence of the state---this we know is not democracy. It is the core of absolutism. Democracy has been waning and autocracy waxing, the rights of men lessening and the rights of the state growing everywhere because the leading democracies have themselves led in practicing beyond their frontiers autocracy instead of democracy.

Clarence K. Streit
Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 27.

People often recommend relativism . . .

People often recommend relativism because they think that it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn't a way to encourage conversation; it's just a reason to fall silent.

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 31

The proposed Charter should . . .

The proposed Charter should, therefore, make clear and unequivocal the straightforward stand of the civilized world for race equality, and the universal application of the democratic way of life, not simply as philanthropy and justice, but to save human civilization from suicide. What was true of the United States in the past is true of world civilization today---we cannot exist half slave and half free.

W. E. B. Du Bois, commenting on the UN Charter at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, April 25th to June 26th, 1945.

Tuck, Steven. Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202.

National sovereignty is . . .

National sovereignty is the enemy of international law. Its affirmation is the negation of law above the national level. The people must abandon the false doctrine of national sovereignty if they are to unite in a world government of law. They must assert and exercise the sovereignty vested in each of them as human beings. So, and only so, can men of many nations form an enduring union of laws superior to their own national laws, for the protection and regulation of the interests they, as human beings, have in common.

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts
"Sovereignty" in The New Federalist
Roberts, Owen J., John F. Schmidt, and Clarence K. Streit
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 12-13.

Nations will learn . . .

Nations will learn that they cannot conquer other nations without losing their own liberty; that permanent confederations are their only means of preserving their independence; and that they should not seek power but security. Gradually mercantile prejudices will fade away; and a false sense of commercial interest will lose the fearful power it once had of drenching the earth in blood and ruining nations under the pretext of enriching them. When at last the nations come to agree on the principles of politics and morality, when in their own better interests they invite foreigners to share equally in all the benefits men enjoy either through the bounty of nature or by their own industry, then all the causes that produce and perpetuate animosities and poison national relations will disappear one by one; and nothing will remain to encourage or even to arouse the fury of war.

Organizations more intelligently conceived than those projects of eternal peace which have filled the leisure and consoled the hearts of certain philosophers, will hasten the progress of the brotherhood of nations, and wars between countries will rank with assassinations as freakish atrocities, humiliating and vile in the eyes of nature and staining with indelible opprobrium the country or the age whose annals record them.

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793)
June Barraclough, trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 194-195.

Now does it mean that to annex a state . . .

Now does it mean that to annex a state and destroy an army, injure and oppress the people, and throw the heritages of sages into confusion will benefit Heaven? But to recruit the people of Heaven to attack the cities of Heaven is to murder the people of Heaven, smash altars, demolish shrines, and kill sacrificial animals. In this way, on the higher level no benefit to Heaven can be attained.

Mozi (ca.470-ca.391 BCE)

Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 227

But how do we know . . .

But how do we know that Heaven loves all the people in the world? Because it enlightens them all. How do we know that it enlightens them all? Because it possesses them all. How do we know that it possesses them all? Because it feeds them all. I say: within the four seas (the world) all grain-eating (civilized) people feed oxen and sheep with grass and dogs and pigs with grain, and cleanly prepare pastry and wine to sacrifice to the Lord on High and spiritual beings. Possessing all people, how could Heaven not love them?

Mozi (ca.470-ca.391 BCE)

Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 220.

In the first century BCE, Cicero . . .

In the first century BCE, Cicero proclaimed a vision of respublica totius orbis - the republic of the whole world.

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 47.